Celebrating the 2-Year Anniversay of Marvel: Avengers Alliance – 8 Major Changes in the Game

by yak max

Many Facebook games are lucky to last two months, let alone two years. But in March of 2014, Marvel: Avengers Alliance managed to do just that. To celebrate the two year anniversary, Playdom permanently re-released the limited edition Avengers costumes and made anniversary cakes available for gifting. Two years may not seem like a long time, but the game has seen numerous major changes in that time and more major changes have already been announced for the near future. If you’ve only just started the game or if you’ve been playing for a long time and simply want to reminisce, the following are eight major changes since Marvel: Avengers Alliance was released.

Command Point Drops – Probably the biggest change in the minds of most players was the removal of command point drops during battles. You used to have a chance of earning up to one command point per battle whenever you hit an enemy. That is no longer the case and the lack of free command points has made it a lot harder to get new heroes, especially when they are all being released at a cost of 90 command points or more.

Increased Silver From Visiting Friends – Originally, when you visited friends and received silver, you only received 30 silver. This value was so low as to be essentially nothing. Playdom changed that so that you earn almost 1,000 silver when you get silver from a friend. That value is much more meaningful and makes daily visits worthwhile.

No New Heroes Less than 90 Command Points – The heroes in the original release ranged in cost from 15 command points to 90 command points. When new heroes were released, they had varying costs. But ever since Quicksilver was released for 48 command points, no hero has been released for less than 90. Some even cost as much as 135 or 200.

Fewer Friends – Originally the game allowed you to have 100 friends. Then that value was reduced to 50. This may seem pretty meaningless, but it had two major repercussions. First, it meant you received half as much free energy per day if you had maxed out your friends. Second, once U-ISOs started dropping from visiting friends, it limited how quickly you could get those as well.

PvP Teams – One of the most heralded changes was the advent of PvP teams. This allowed you to define a set team for offensive PvP and another set team for defensive PvP. Before this you had to switch out members of your team before entering PvP and if you wanted a different PvP team, you had to switch members and costumes again before logging off. It also meant that if you were attacked while engaged in PvE, your defensive team would be your active PvE team.

New Buffs and Debuffs – Originally the game had very few buffs or debuffs. The buffs in the game were strengthened, agile, focused, and fortified. The debuffs were weakened, slowed, dizzied, exposed, bleeding, stunned, chilled, and burning. A few heroes had unique buffs as well like Black Cat, but they were few and far between. Dozens of new buffs and debuffs have since been added, with many debuffs, especially becoming incredibly common, including death frost, soulfire, dark void, melt armor, off-balance, winded, and cornered. They are now nearly as common as the original buffs and debuffs.

Multi-Use Powers – In late 2013, Playdom managed to program powers to have multiple functions. Before that the closest that existed was some heroes could use a power to switch to a completely different set of powers. Those types of heroes still exist, but some heroes, including most of the ones that switch powers, now have powers that extend when moused over. This allows you to choose from one of multiple powers. It is also means that heroes with only four powers are quickly becoming the exception rather than the rule.

Improved Class Buffs – Class buffs have existed since the start of the game, but the original balance of those buffs needed some work. Tacticians and bruisers, for example, were startlingly weak, while scrappers and infiltrators were almost overpowered. Then Playdom started tweaking the buffs. Every single buff got improved in one way or another. Bruisers increased all stats when enraged rather than just attacks, scrappers gained true strike close quarters fighting, infiltrators gained a damage boost with combat reflexes, tacticians could gain an off turn action when attacked by blasters, and blasters now ignore defense with focused attack. Additionally, all classes but tacticians can now gain their buffs with area attacks and all classes now gain those buffs when attacked by enemies. These were major changes that made the rock-paper-scissors game of classes much more meaningful.